Fourth Sunday in Lent

Reading 1: 2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23
Responsorial: Psalms 137:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
Reading 2: Ephesians 2:4-10
Gospel: John 3:14-21

Seeing is Believing

The holding up of the serpent in the desert referred to in today’s gospel is the story from Exodus when God’s people were grumbling and forgot God’s mercy in their deliverance, so God sent poisonous snakes to get their attention.  The people repented and God had Moses fashion a bronze serpent and put it on a poll, and everyone who gazed upon the serpent were healed.  Jesus uses this allusion to Exodus to suggest that he will be “raised up”, both in the sense of being elevated on the cross, and resurrected after the crucifixion.  This sense of salvation being linked to setting eyes on the cross is suggests the power of conversion is linked to witnessing the crucifixion and resurrection.

            It is interesting to note that King David, a few centuries later, had Moses’ bronze serpent destroyed because people turned it into an idol; they could not get around mistaking the object for what lay behind the object.  Indeed at the heart of our looking at the cross, it isn’t any particular cross of Christ crucified we look at but what it represents, the one, holy cross of Christ; a man and God who bore our sins; we can only see the salvation of the cross if we can see beyond the image of Christ and see the sins borne by God as Jesus on the cross.  These sins become visible only to the one who has repented, has turned so he or she can face the cross and live.  An unrepentant sinner only sees sheer foolishness; any sound-thinking god would have simply started over this ill-conceived experiment and leave out free will this time. 

            Last week in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians the apostle declares “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God”(1Cor.1:18).  Likewise, Jesus in today’s gospel says “...whoever does not believe has already been condemned”.  This condemnation does not come from God, but from the ineffectiveness of what they worship that ultimately fails to offer salvation. The cross of Christ can’t save one who can’t see their sins in the wounds of Christ, cannot see how their sins participate in wounding a wider world and, ultimately God. Sin is never private, it is always communal because we live in a tissue of social relationships and are interconnected in this kind of cause-and –effect dance more now than ever before in the world’s history.  You might not be able to grasp how your sins wound God, but you can, if you care to look, see how sin wounds the one whom you have offended, and that person is, for you, Christ. That is why the Cross is such a powerful devotion for the faithful; it calls us to contemplate the wider effects of our sin, sin that can pierce the very heart of God.  In our repentance, God heals those wounds and Christ’s Cross becomes the Crown of Easter.